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“The Process Was More Important Than the Result”: My First Film Star Odessa Young, Back To One, Episode 308
Odessa Young is only 26, but she already has a truly impressive body of work behind her. Assassination Nation, A Million Little Pieces, Shirley, Mothering Sunday, The Stand, The Staircase, Manodrome, in each of these projects, she seems to have an effortless command over her character, each unique, never forced, always true. Now she stars as Vita, the lead character based on Zia Anger in My First Film. On this episode, she talks about the need to “cultivate an obsession” as character preparation, recent musings on “how much an actor should act to the camera,” why she never worries about […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Sep 11, 2024 -
TIFF 2024: Cloud, The End
Waiting for Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud to start, I wondered how much time I’d spent over the years watching his signature warehouses, offices and apartments. The man loves a purpose-built soundstage set, the drabber the better but counterintuitively showcased under unrepentantly artificial lighting—one rung down from “Lynchian” in terms of overt ominousness but similarly ready to radiate menace. Those sets’ simplicity offsets his films’ often elevated eccentricity levels, though by Kurosawa’s standards Cloud is comparatively sedate insofar as it has a fully explicable plot: Online reseller Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) offloads one too many shoddy knockoff goods, attracting the ire of […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 11, 2024 -
“It Sounded Like a Good Title”: Jeremy Saulnier on Rebel Ridge
In Jeremy Saulnier’s breakthrough films Blue Ruin and Green Room, the writer-director thrust protagonists into violent cacophonies they weren’t equipped to navigate. With his new Netflix actioner Rebel Ridge, Saulnier centers his story on a hero much more adept at meeting force with force. The film stars Aaron Pierre as a Marine hand-to-hand combat expert who comes to a small southern town to bail out his cousin. Before he can do so, his bail money is confiscated by the corrupt, militarized local police force (led by chief Don Johnson) via a bogus civil asset forfeiture claim. Confrontations—both verbal and physical—ensue. […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Sep 11, 2024 -
“Ordinary People Who Become Very Violent”: Kiyoshi Kurosawa on Cloud
The J-horrors that catapulted Kiyoshi Kurosawa from reliable gun for hire under the Japanese studio system to internationally revered auteur saw terror as indissolubly bound with tech. Conceived at the turn of the millennium, they spoke to those years’ paranoias about digital life: ghosts pouring out of dial-up internet (Pulse, 2001), senseless murders upending pristine cityscapes (Cure, 1997), and lives aremodeled by perfect doubles (Doppelganger, 2003). Cloud, his latest, offers a new equation, no longer anchoring dread to media but capitalism. It’s not that computer screens are nowhere in sight; the film’s hero, Yoshii (Masaki Suda), is a hustler who […]
by Leonardo Goi on Sep 10, 2024 -
TIFF 2024: Lázaro at Night, Hard Truths
Bell and Bulgari are gone as sponsors, but Listerine is one of 37 new ones at TIFF 2024. This year, the defining image of the fest’s early days has been the 95-milliliter bottles of Listerine Total Care (Mild Mint) neatly arrayed on mini-shelves next to the sinks in the washrooms of the festival’s Lightbox headquarters. There, the walls are branded with mock-movie poster key art for “Listerine: The Movie,” with a bottle of that pink liquid sandwiched between five-star laurels for “Refreshing Plot Twist” and “Breath of Fresh Air.” An employee stocking those bottles estimated that over a thousand are […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 9, 2024 -
“With Viktor I Approached Sign Language Just Like Any Other Language”: Olivier Sarbil on His TIFF-premiering doc Viktor
One of the cinematic highlights of this year’s TIFF, Olivier Sarbil’s Ukraine-set (and Darren Aronofsky-produced) Viktor follows the titular protagonist, a Kharkiv resident who lives with his widowed mother and faces a most unusual conundrum. Desperate to defend his country, Viktor — a sword-loving giant of a man whose bible is Miyamoto Musashi’s The Strategy of the Samurai — is nevertheless blocked from joining the war effort because he just so happens to be Deaf. Fortunately, Viktor possesses the dogged determination of a noble warrior and manages to convince the local army to take him on as a volunteer photojournalist […]
by Lauren Wissot on Sep 8, 2024 -
“My Father Started Using the Hidden Camera to Send Messages Expressing What Seemed Like Regrets”: Lina Vdovîi and Radu Ciorniciuc on their TIFF-Premiering Doc Tata
Lina Vdovîi and Radu Ciorniciuc’s TIFF-debuting Tata originated with a cry for help from a migrant worker being physically assaulted by his boss. The Romania-based filmmakers, partners in life and art, are both veteran investigative journalists in their region — Vdovîi an award-winning reporter from the Republic of Moldova who’s been nominated for the European Press Prize, Ciorniciuc a co-founder of the first independent media organization in Romania — so worker exploitation was a familiar beat. More troubling, however, was the familiarity of the man video messaging the duo from Italy: Vdovîi’s dad, a father who she’d long been estranged […]
by Lauren Wissot on Sep 7, 2024 -
Resurrecting Kathleen Parlow: Sofia Bohdanowicz on Her TIFF-Premiering Measures for a Funeral
Around a decade ago, Sofia Bohdanowicz began what would become a cycle of films, encompassing the features Never Eat Alone, MS Slavic 7 and A Woman Escaped (co-directed by Blake Williams and Burak Çevik) and the shorts Veslemøy’s Song and Point and Line to Plane, starring Deragh Campbell (who is often credited as cowriter or codirector) as Audrey Benac, a sort of fictional alter-ego who has encounters with art, and in particular with the artistic legacy of Bohdanowicz’s forbears. In Veslemøy’s Song, Audrey travels to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to listen to a haunting vintage […]
by Mark Asch on Sep 7, 2024 -
The Devil, Most Definitely: Christopher Jason Bell on His Ten-Part Archival George W. Bush Docu-Series Miss Me Yet
“When George W Bush becomes president, for the first time, I knew someone dumber than me was president, and the whole fucking thing fell apart. It’s all been a house of cards, it’s all been a shell game, and a mirror illusion, and George W. Bush made it so you could finally see through the mirror, at all the wrong angles.” — Quentin Tarantino. Over the last four presidential administrations, Christopher Jason Bell has produced an estimable body of work, directing more than13 shorts and three features, devoted to creating off-beat, experimental, and challenging microbudget cinema, spanning narrative, documentary and […]
by Evan Louison on Sep 6, 2024 -
12 Films to Anticipate at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival
With the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival now underway, we at Filmmaker picked 12 films we are anticipating seeing. Consider it a given that higher-profile Telluride and Venice premieres such as the two Sigrid Nunez adaptations (The Friend and The Room Next Door), Conclave, Saturday Night are on our list too, but don’t overlook these films, for which TIFF is either their world premiere or North American launch. Bonjour Tristesse. For her debut feature author (Too Much and Not the Mood) and cultural critic Durga Chew-Bose — she interviewed Mia Hansen-Love for Filmmaker several years back — has ambitiously adapted […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 5, 2024
